The Stolypin Land Reform as ‘Administrative Utopia’: Images of Peasantry in Nineteenth-Century Russia

Abstract

The call in recent years for historians of Russia to show sensitivity to language and semiotics in their research is especially relevant to studying the history of the Russian peasant. Peasants were quintessential ‘others’ in Russian society; they were an objectified class which was ‘spoken for, debated over, represented and categorised, central to any vision of future polity, but excluded from the process of envisioning it’.¹ The historiography of the Russian peasant in the nineteenth and early twentieth century shows that at that time there was no universal understanding of ‘peasantry’; rather, it was a category that was ambiguous and contested. In addition to the legal definition of a peasant as a person born into a particular social estate, there were numerous competing understandings of the category that projected a range of personal qualities, and social and political attributes, onto peasants. Educated Russians might be touched by the idea of the peasant as a primordial human being or, alternatively, impatient with peasant ‘backwardness’, but their imaginings always dramatized the distance between themselves and the peasants. The Stolypin Land Reform was an important moment in this process of ‘othering’ the Russian peasant.